News & Events

UM OTC Announces Inventions of the Year

April 22, 2008

Adam O'Donovan, Nail Gumerov and Ramani Duraiswami won the UMD 2007 Information Science Invention of the year with their Audio Camera for Efficient Sound Localization".

Much as an optical camera creates images from captured light intensity to create a real time picture, an audio "camera" creates a real-time audio image out of sound arriving from all directions to a specific point - the location of the camera. The audio images can be projected onto a corresponding video image for a complete understanding of where the sound originates. Audio images are created using a spherical microphone array "beam former" and then related to video images using standard computer vision techniques.